1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a network printer for automatically receiving, editing and printing contents on a network such as the internet and a method for printing contents on the network.
The present application is based on Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-148548, which is incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
A related art network printer is connected to a network such as a LAN and shared by a plurality of host computers. The main feature of such a network printer is limited to receiving a print job from the host computer connected to the network and printing images corresponding to the print job.
ON the other hand, contents retained by a server on a network such as the internet are generally described in the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), obtained by using a browser installed in a host computer and displayed on the host computer screen. Necessary sections of the contents are printed on a printer according to the instruction from the operator. Or, the host computer can retain the contents described in the HTML in its memory area and display or print the contents later.
With the widespread use of the internet, it is possible to obtain all the target contents from web pages on the internet every morning. Contents to be obtained every morning include, for example, daily headline news information, weather forecast information in the nearby area, stock price information on the user 's stocks, and the user's bank balance information.
Web sites that retain such information may be often varied or such information may often reside in difference URLs in the same web site. Thus, to obtain such information routinely at a predetermined time (such as every morning), the operator or user has to access respective web sites, receive the necessary contents in the HTML document format, display the contents via a browser, and print necessary sections. In case a plurality of web sites must be visited, it is necessary to perform a cumbersome operation of accessing each web site and select necessary contents on the host computer.
Further, contents retained in a web site may not always be composed of necessary information alone. A web site contains various information such as the contents of the site, a variety of banner ads and unnecessary contents. Thus, printing a web page containing necessary contents outputs an image containing unnecessary contents also. In order to avoid this, the user may specify necessary sections of the web page for printing. This requires operation on the browser each time and in case information is obtained from a plurality of web sites, printed pages corresponding to the web sites are output.